It has become commonplace for people to utilize a number of communication devices in their daily activities. For example, a person may utilize multiple communication devices such as a laptop computer, a mobile telephone and a tablet computer, sometimes concurrently, in order to perform various tasks. With the proliferation of digital content, the prevalence of applications and the growing importance of these communication devices with respect to people's daily activities, it is anticipated that people will utilize even more communication devices on a more frequent basis in the future.
It would be desirable for the multiple communication devices utilized by a person to interoperate with one another. In this manner, a user or an application could select the best or most readily available communication device to perform each task. However, it has proven challenging to maintain communication devices in synchronization with one another so as to facilitate the interoperability of the communication devices without requiring an undesired amount of manual effort. For example, it may take considerable user effort to determine a meaningful role for each of the communication devices. The communication device may then need to be transitioned into a particular state. Further still, in an instance in which the list of available communication devices changes, e.g. in an instance in which a communication device is added or removed from a network, the role for each device may be changed.
Techniques have been developed for device pairing, such as the pairing of a Bluetooth™ headset with a mobile telephone. However, these techniques generally apply to specific pairs of communication devices and focus on the connectivity and/or networking issues. As such, people who utilize two or more communication devices may find it challenging to commence a task, e.g., an application, utilizing one of the communication devices and then continue work on the same task utilizing another communication device since the communication devices may not be readily able to co-operate, at least not without explicit effort required of the user.